


The Morning Walk

by RurouniHime



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Commitment, Community: hd_remix, Established Relationship, Introspection, M/M, Remix, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-19
Updated: 2011-08-19
Packaged: 2017-10-22 19:38:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/241783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RurouniHime/pseuds/RurouniHime
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Draco finds solace in his morning strolls.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Morning Walk

**Author's Note:**

  * For [coffeejunkii](https://archiveofourown.org/users/coffeejunkii/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Autumn Afternoon](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/4195) by coffeejunkii. 



> Remix of Coffeejunkii's Autumn Afternoon.

Draco slips from under the duvet into the cold morning room with as little movement as he can manage. Harry's nose, so lately nestled into the hollow of Draco's pillow, is rosy-pink. Draco tucks the top quilt around hunched, heated shoulders, lets his hand linger for just that single moment, as he does every morning, and then dons trousers and shirt, and finds his way across chilly floorstones to the kitchen. His shoes are a damp misery by the door, muted by the thick wool of socks. His? He's no longer sure, and somewhere along the way, he stopped differentiating.

The crisp morning is full of soft pinks and vibrant purples. Draco's own hands stand out against the luminous sunrise. His long overcoat is a dark blotch, stark and disruptive, and poignant, he thinks. Disruption can be instructive, if one is open-minded enough to be taught.

The chitter of the earliest avian risers loops and reels into the hush. For many mornings, the sound woke Draco into a grouchy haze of whispered curses and burrowing into quilts, or the pliant, hot skin of his drowsy bedmate. When exactly it was that he learned to hear the tune under the racket, he is not certain, but he listens to the thrush and blackbird now with something approaching - if not quite reaching - welcome.

Draco walks every morning now, because Harry is not a morning person, has never been, and would rather take his tea already warmed upon his stumble from bed when the sun has been up for some hours. Draco finds all the time he needs within the fields and sloping hills, and still comes home to put the kettle on. And maybe, maybe take that white cup with the blue dots out of the cupboard and hold it in his hands as he waits for the water to boil. The edges jag at his skin, rough along the chipped rim and the place where the handle once curved. He turns it over and over as he stares out the window at the golden ball of light climbing over the ridge. It is only when the kettle begins its reedy shriek that he remembers himself and sets the cup down.

It is Harry's cup. Draco has never drunk from it, and if he has his way, he never will.

It is a clear morning full of flitting birds and the inconstant tug of breeze. As if the night is breathing itself away in soft, forlorn gusts. The tang of past rain is not there, but Draco still sees the similarities between this wintry morn and the one just after the night he arrived, soaking wet in a downpour he hadn't the patience to care about, dripping on the small cobbled stoop as Harry stared at him through the open front door.

The morning had dawned bright the following day, and Draco thinks, as he picks his way down the narrow foot path in the drawn shadows of the trees, that maybe it was the first arrival he ever truly understood.

Draco has arrived, has been arriving for weeks. Arriving at thoughts and realizations. Arriving at sounds he never thought he'd make. Books he never thought he'd read, and rents in his flesh and in his hea— in his… his flesh that he never thought he'd be bold enough to risk. Or absent enough. Tiny, thin tears that surprised him by not bleeding right away, or scarring over.

How can they scar over when he keeps helping them reopen?

A break in the line of trees to his left lets a gust of wind from the valley tease his cheeks. Draco stops and breathes, and wonders at pain and the absence of it. He hasn't felt pain for two-plus months, and with all these little rips and tears and cracks inside him, he probably should have. Some cuts are different that way, though; they give no pain, nor should they, but it takes some time to figure all that out. He has stopped likening them to the occasional stubbed toe or gash across his knee, the ones that had him in brief furies over the impertinence of stone floors and drawers left open too far.

Harry likes the stone floors, and Draco, if he is perfectly frank with himself, loves them. They are cold, too much like ice this autumn and growing colder by the minute as the snows creep ever nearer. He imagines the hills in rolling white, wonders if there is enough snow here to manage such a blanket, and if there is enough firewood to fill the infinitesimal space between white and wondrous.

He wonders if there is enough room against Harry's stomach for bare feet just drawn up off the stone floor, and in his warm, cupped hands.

How to explain to Harry what it feels like to have him touch his feet? Not the tender finger-points or the almost-painful kneading of heat from skin to skin. How it feels in his soul, not his flesh. Draco has always liked his own feet, admired them shamelessly with their long, slender toes and perfect arches and elegant tendons. But his feet are intimate, hidden places. Sometimes they seem more _his_ than any other part of his body, and to touch them, carefully, casually, even accidentally, is the breaching of a wall that he does not think Harry is yet aware of.

But Draco has never been good at walls with Harry.

The fields are frosted over already, delicate chips of ice tipping each strand of grass. Draco ambles, and wonders what it would be like to take off his shoes and feel the chill seeping between his toes, melting the frost with his body heat. Staring at bare, pale feet that, somewhere along the way, ceased to be entirely his and became someone else's.

It is like when Harry takes his hand, sliding palm over palm and weaving fingers. Shared warmth, the touch of entwining. As they walk. As they skirt around each other in the kitchen, guiding hands over cooking pans and old, cracked plates; joining. In the cool, slow darkness as they make love.

He remembers the press of the backs of his hands into soft sheets and downy mattress, and shivers. Even now he can taste the clutch and release of Harry's fingers against his knuckles. Stretching. Squeezing.

He loves Harry's hands. Worships them, if he were to give it a name. Because Harry allows him to do so. While it might be more attentive to kiss Harry's mouth, more prudent, perhaps, to let his lips wander - because that body, _Harry's_ body, is no less Harry than his hands - in the silky stillness of nighttime, daytime, sex, _feeling_ … he always returns to Harry's hands.

Touching those hands does not make Harry stutter or tangle his words in much-needed breath. It does not quicken the sublime arch of his back, tense the muscles of his thighs in that last foggy, incoherent instant, when everything is most in danger of being said. It does not bring Harry over the brink.

But it does bring Draco over. Again. Again.

Draco steps off the path and crosses the field, leaving a swath of bent grass and crackled ice behind him. He can see the cottage through the low-hanging mist, looking like some fairytale gingerbread house. Draco squints. One of the eaves hangs loose, and the earthy paint is patchy along the east corner where the rays of the sun are sliding lower. He has long since learned to recognize the faint edging of darker paint below the top coat, and the comforting angle of that drifting eave. The perfection of towering manors and pristine gardens strikes him as unreal now, a fantasy he had once and lost, thankfully. The imperfections are the spirit of the cottage after all, the asymmetry of a private smile, the delicate fleck of hazel in deep green eyes.

Draco has come to yearn for imperfection. To need its importance. He has known for some time that he himself is imperfect.

A small, unobtrusive book sits upon his nightstand these days, its cover wrinkled and its pages dog-eared, something he told himself he would never do to a piece of literature. For literature this is, though for a time he had trouble deciding which name on the cover was the author and which was the title. He is nearly finished. Would have been earlier, except Harry startled him a week ago with a subtle and creeping fear during such a walk as this.

 _All your things are gone, and the door bangs in the wind because you forgot to close it properly when you—_

He has told Harry the book is tedious, and for some time, it was. He turned it over in his hands many a time and wondered at the way it clung to him, unable to be laid aside. Blamed it on the calm of the cottage and the undiscerning humour he found himself in just as the twilight rose from the earth to claim the skies each evening. But now, he feels it thrumming in his core in ways that keep him awake at night, staring up at the uneven ceiling and wondering about attics and hidden secrets. Secret love. The power of briar and ivy, and the ceaseless tug of two souls against one another, perhaps in a futile, endless dance for a peace that will always be pulled from their grasp by the pasts they have tried to abandon. He is struck by it because he knows the past can be overcome, but that possibly, he has not managed it as well as he thought he had.

Harry has asked him why he came here. Why, why, why. As if he even knew. Such a question… Draco sighs: It often has no answer.

Draco has not lied. He knows he is not ready to pin down a life that may end up to be a century and a half long, to fix it to a certain place or person. He is practical to a fault, and knows that life has a canny, mercurial meddler lurking behind its stately mask. He is also aware that the moment when he actually _does_ pin his life down is under little threat from this; he can see it approaching, still far enough away to rest easily in his consciousness. That moment is ingratiating itself with him little by little, becoming a thick blanket over his freezing body, the honeyed taste of tea on his tongue. A set of warm hands rubbing at the soles of his feet.

But there is more to it than that, just as there is a dark and dusty attic in Thornfield, and Draco would be a fool to push that part of it aside. He would be unwise, and unworthy of everything he feels himself falling toward whenever he steps out into this cold, clear air, or tumbles into the heat of firelight and cracked tea cups and Harry in the cottage.

Draco does not work in absolutes. Absolutes are for people still hiding from themselves, because people _do_ , and people keep sides of themselves tucked away where even they may not see; they don't see the gray lines between every shadow, how often unexpected clouds sweep in over the sun and pearly blue, how life rotates like the heavens, but in the sudden, sheer twist of a moment, very unlike the stars. Draco's life is a wild, tempestuous creature and eventually it may rear its misshapen, scarred head and demand other things of him than this.

Draco knows already - has even whispered it aloud in the darkness of the night kitchen with a glass of ice water trembling in his hand - that he will tell it to go to _hell_ when it does.

Harry did not question the shards of broken glass in the rubbish bin the next morning, nor the broom propped against the kitchen counter. But Draco knows he saw them both.

Has Harry thought of the moment when _he_ might leave? When the cottage door might swing from a greater and more lasting sorrow than a mere parting of ways? Draco has seen people come and go, and felt them take bits of himself with them when they vanish from the earth. It is sometimes too difficult; the nights too long, the days too oppressive, to pull at those new, painless furrows in his soul and simply hold the pieces out in front of him. They might be snatched away.

He has always kept something for himself alone.

 _Someday soon, I want to be able to say that I'll be here with you, for good._

It is no riddle; it is the truth, the one he sees approaching like an old friend in the distance. How he spoke the words themselves is still a mystery; such vows do not come easily to him, and he knows it is most definitely a vow because it does not disappear in the winds of his memory. He meant it. He would speak it again, had he to start all over. For it is the truth, and there is one person he has found he will _never_ lie to. But it still beats at a primal part of his soul, the part he tucked away and may have - may have already - lost control over.

 _And when I do, I want to mean it. Because…because I don't want to disappoint you, or hurt you._

He fears he has already hurt Harry. Knows he has. Just as he knows the cross of lines traversing Harry's palm, the ripple of taut knuckles, coarse fingertips. He kisses them all, hoping the pain is there in those creases and veins and bones, that he has somehow eased with silence what he is too cowardly to admit out loud.

The path meanders into sight again, and Draco leaves the field with damp trouser legs and the watery warmth of the rising sun on his face and neck. The breeze whorls about in his hair, and he can smell the blossoms of the valley - thistle and honeydew. Long since intertwined with the cottage and Harry in his mind. Harry will be dreaming, tucked under layers of quilts and throws, dark hair a rich splash across the snowy pillow case. The cottage beckons, and Draco quickens his steps just enough to send a pair of warbling swifts into the trees.

Draco stops. Watches them flick and dart about the branches. An oak today, its limbs dark and dewy, nestled in ruddy orange leaves. Yesterday it had been a tall, regal beech. They are never in the same tree twice, but they are always, always together.

He sees, all over again as if it were the first time and not the second or third such epiphany this week, that he has defined "home" incorrectly all his life. And perhaps he has reached it, the real thing, at last. If he could only speak the words to himself.

The cottage is quiet with morning, and the quilts still hold the slope and shade of a slumberer. Harry's hand has left the confines of heat and thrown itself outward, palm up against the sheets. Fingers curled, casting shadows across his skin. Draco cannot stop himself from reaching, touching that soft palm with one finger, tracing a line he knows well. Harry's head turns, the slightest of sighs, and Draco is caught, frozen halfway between standing and kneeling, and unable to move.

He mouths three words into the silence. Three words he cannot yet find voice for, but hears every day, every moment. With every breath.

They take different shapes from time to time, warning Harry of scalding water, chiding his mess in the sink. Urging breathlessly amidst the heat and sweat and most sacred of physical devotions. But he knows, every time he speaks, that they are the same three words.

~fin~


End file.
